Admitting that every event, miraculous as well as common, is under law, it by no means renders a present directing and energizing Deity unnecessary. This hypothesis admits that organic life had a beginning, for its grand object is to show how it began by law alone. Now, who gave to matter, in a gaseous state, such wonderful laws that this fair world should be the result of their operation? If it would require infinite wisdom as well as power to create the present universe at once out of nothing, would it demand less of contrivance and skill to impart such powers to brute matter? It was not merely a power to produce organic natures, to form their complicated organs, to give life, and instinct, and intellect; but to adapt each particle, each organ, each animal, and each plant, most exactly and most wonderfully to its place in the vast system, so that every single thing should most beautifully harmonize with every other thing.
Again. What is a natural law without the presence and energizing power of the lawgiver? How easily are men bewildered by words! and none has led more astray than this word _law_. We talk about its power to produce certain effects; but who can point out any inherent power of this sort which it possesses? Who can show how a law operates but through the energizing influence of the lawgiver? How unphilosophical then to separate a law of nature from the Deity, and to imagine him to have withdrawn from his works! For to do this would be to annihilate the law. He must be present every moment, and direct every movement of the universe, just as really as the mind of man must be in the body to produce its movements. Take away God from the universe, or let him cease to act mentally upon it, and every movement would as instantly and certainly cease, as would every movement of the human frame, were the mind to be withdrawn, or cease to will. We realize the necessity of the divine presence and energy to produce a miracle. But if miracles are performed according to law, as much as common events,--and we surely cannot prove they are not,--why is a present Deity any more necessary in the one case than in the other? The Bible considers common and miraculous events exactly alike in this respect. And true philosophy teaches the same.